jtogel writes: Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, a comprehensive record of your playing activities is collected on servers at Square Enix. Pretty much everything is tracked: from number of deaths, causes of death, requests for help, total and relative play time and rewards collected. Researchers at the University of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS and Northeastern University have mined this data to identify how playing behavior evolves throughout the entire game.Using unsupervised behavioral clustering algorithms on gameplay data from 62,000 players, they identified six archetypes that both offered explanatory strength and representation value difference. Confirming earlier work that clustered players into Runners, Pacifists, Solvers and Veterans, this research found consistent spread of behavior at all levels of the game except when the design of a level enforced defined play attitudes. What’s more, playing styles vary and evolve as you play the game. This research helps game designers identify how players change from one type of behavior to the other, for example move from novice to expert, or from a non-paying user to become a paying user. (So that they can put all their effort into the ones that will eventually pay?)

It's clear that they have no intention of backing down or addressing user concerns. The only question now is, what site will we all move to after Beta stops being optional?

I'm doing the Slashcott, too, but I don't have any delusions that it'll get them to adopt the only course of action that would be acceptable: abandon the Beta site, keep "classic" Slashdot, issue an apology, and never try this shit again.

Dice doesn't care. They bought Slashdot for the name and the traffic. They'll end up ruining the former and driving away the latter.

1. Be willing to be on call 24/7... why should this be the case? Maybe this should change.2. Spend free time researching and learning? Really... I need this for my job? No I don't and companies can train people.3. Forgoing human contact? There is no reason for this again. Many tech jobs heavily involve communication be it for product planning, support, design meetings......

You're competing against people (mostly men) who ARE willing to do these things.

So she's not very qualified relative to the other applicants. She's no worse off than a man with the same qualifications. When the labor supply is so much larger than demand, employers just keep raising the bar. If we were struggling to find programmers, things would be different. This push to make more and more people into programmers is only going to worsen the situation for people seeking their first job, and will depress wages for the people who do get hired....it's almost like that's the point.

Spending 8+ hours a day isolated at a computer, forgoing human contact to spend most of your free time researching and learning, interacting with machines and electronics at the lowest and least intuitive levels, willing to be on call almost 24/7--takes a certain constellation of personality traits. For whatever reason, these traits skew male; not entirely, but heavily. You can debate about whether this is cultural, environmental, genetic, or some combination. Open for discussion is even the question if we should be concerned at all. You don't hear the same kind of panic about the lack of men in early education or nursing.

There are probably as many women in tech as want to be there. What's really stopping them other than themselves and their own preferences?

Do you think he did this out of the goodness of his anti-Semitic heart, or because he saw the writing on the wall and wanted to get out ahead of the labor movement? Things were heading in that direction anyway and he just preemptively implemented a policy which was rapidly approaching. Why was it approaching? The labor movement.